Quick! Somebody Save This Place
"By the way, these presidents didn’t lead the changes as much as they were chosen by people who changed their approaches as they reacted to the consequences of the excesses of the swings," Ray Dalio wrote this week, after recapping a century of "left-right pendulum swings" in the US.
That's a key point. I've repeatedly emphasized that although capitalism is quite fairly judged to be the "best" humanist religion we've managed to come up with so far, its excesses long ago reached intolerable le
I am so tired of the “Democrats are going it alone” narrative. What the hell have Republicans been doing for 40 years? Going it the eff alone! Nixon, Reagan, Bush 2, and Trump all went it alone. The Republican majority leaders have all gone it alone. How many freaking bills died on McConnell’s desk last year? How many crap judges did he push through? How many horribly corrupt department heads did they approve? I mean the Republicans are the definition of going it alone.
Basically the entire Republican agenda is spitting in the face of the majority of voters.
If your enemy isn’t willing to work with you when they have power, take a page from their book and return the favor when you do. Otherwise you’ll just end up further and further behind.
+1
True, but dems (or at least Biden) run/ran on a centrist message. Going it alone runs counter to that narrative, which republics are all to happy to remind the public of every chance they get.
Amen!
I respectfully object as it relates to Reagan. Dan Rostenkowski at Ways and Means wrote the Reagan Tax Bill. The 1986 Tax Act was bipartisan.
And then Dan Rostenkowski went to prison. Birds of a feather comes to mind.
The Democrats have this year and part of next year to get things done to save America from itself. If they don’t get some sort of infrastructure and a modicum of further help for working class and struggling folks, the whole deal comes undone. That is why Biden has instructed the agriculture department to redo the food stamp eligibility.
The bulk of my 75+ years of life has passed in an increasingly divided America I came to think was a unique in its history. A steadily growing body of research shows that the idea of compromise and power sharing is “the big lie.” It just doesn’t happen and the longer opposing sides discuss the thornier issues facing the country, the farther apart those sides will become. The thing is, look at our history (and the literature that clarifies it) and you will see this has been going on for longer than the country itself has existed as a country. Just recently someone just pointed out that a similar divisive period existed from just after the Civil War until WWI. I hadn’t thought of that because it was covered up by relative economic prosperity. Sound familiar? The US has only been a nation for about 250 years and has only been the fifty state nation it is for less than 100 years. As nations go historically that probably puts us in the middle, age-wise, of global nationhood. Nations like Germany and Italy are much younger and most of the Balkans consist of nations that are younger than many of your kids. And all of them share something in common, political and cultural division. I’d love to think I could live long enough to see this change but I know I won’t. I feel bad for my grandson who will have to live through God only knows what kind of mess but it won’t be nice or “normal.” It won’t be the 50s either. BTW, at the time of the Civil War, the GOP were the liberals (remember Abe?) and the democrats were the stuffed shirt conservatives.
I think it makes more sense to categorize the Civil War Era GOP as industrialists concerned with leveling the labor playing field instead of having to compete with slave holders. The idea they were some sort of liberal progressive party is inaccurate.
In that light the current GOP makes more and less sense. They stuck with industry functioning as a misinformation platform protecting business interests but they have been doing it so long the level of misinformation needed to counteract readily available facts essentially requires a personality cult.
The Democrats losing the power that they were once afforded by rallying white farmers as farming industrialized needed to get more supporters and they were in a better position to take up policies that promoted the well being of lower classes in general.
That said neither party is exactly what you would call a democratic progressive party which I think is what we sorely need to actually advance the interests of the public akin to the Roosevelt Green party.